Eliseo Medina facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Eliseo Vasquez Medina
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Eliseo Medina testifying before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, April 30, 2009.
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| Born | January 24, 1946 |
| Occupation | Labor leader |
| Spouse(s) | Dorothy Johnson (1976-1993) Liza Hirsch Du Brul (1995-present) |
Eliseo Vasquez Medina (born January 24, 1946) is a Mexican-American labor leader. He is also a strong supporter of immigration reform in the United States. From 1973 to 1978, he was on the board of the United Farm Workers (UFW). He later became a top leader at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). He was the first Mexican American to serve on SEIU's executive board. Medina retired from his role as an SEIU executive vice president in 2013.
Contents
Early Life and Family
Eliseo Medina was born in Huanusco, Zacatecas, Mexico. His parents, Eliseo and Guadalupe Medina, were both farm workers. In the 1940s and 1950s, his father worked in the U.S. as a farmworker. Sometimes he worked without legal papers, and other times as a "bracero" (a Mexican worker allowed to work in the U.S. temporarily).
Eliseo's mother's parents died in the Mexican Revolution. This made her care deeply about social justice, and she taught her children to feel the same way.
Moving to the U.S.
In 1954, Eliseo's family moved to Tijuana, Mexico. His father worked in the U.S. without legal papers for two years. His mother insisted that the family wait until his father could get legal entry for them. The family then settled in Delano, California. His father, mother, and two older sisters started working in the fields, picking produce.
Eliseo and his two younger siblings went to public school. When he started, he only spoke Spanish. But he quickly learned English and did very well in his classes. He worked as a picker on weekends and school breaks to help his family earn money. He finished eighth grade with honors. However, after being told that Hispanic students should only take shop classes in high school, Eliseo left school. He became a full-time grape and orange picker.
Joining the Farm Workers' Fight
When Eliseo was 19, he broke his leg and couldn't work for six months. On September 16, 1965, he went to a meeting. It was held by the National Farm Workers Association (which later became the United Farm Workers). They were deciding whether to join a strike started by a small Filipino union. This meeting began the famous Delano grape strike.
Eliseo spent almost all his money to join the union that day. Within weeks, he became a "strike captain." He helped organize the picketers and others who supported the strike. In 1966, the grape strike continued. Eliseo was recruited by Dolores Huerta to help organize workers at the DiGiorgio Corporation. He met César Chávez around this time. He learned how to organize from Fred Ross, a well-known community organizer.
During the DiGiorgio campaign, Eliseo was attacked by organizers from another union, the Teamsters. His hard work and experiences caught Chávez's attention. Medina was then sent to Chicago to lead the union's boycott of grapes there. He continued to rise in the union and became one of its key leaders.
Union Career
Working with the UFW
Eliseo Medina started working full-time for the UFW in 1966. He worked in Los Angeles and San Francisco, California. His job was to make sure non-union grapes were not sent overseas and that wine made from them was not sold in stores. He worked closely with Dolores Huerta and was even jailed.
In 1967, César Chávez sent him to Chicago, Illinois. His task was to start the Midwestern part of the national boycott. This boycott was a big part of the Delano grape strike. Eliseo was very shy and often couldn't speak during interviews. But he built one of the most successful boycott efforts in the country. This effort helped force growers to sign important contracts in 1970.
While in Chicago, he also raised thousands of dollars for the UFW. In 1968, Medina traveled across the country with farmworkers in a school bus. They went to the Northeast to get support for a boycott of products made from Delano grapes. He realized that some organizing methods didn't work as well in cities. So, he started developing his own ideas for gaining support from people who weren't farmworkers.
Medina returned to the Midwest and began holding sit-ins in supermarkets. He wanted to show how hard farmworkers' lives were. He encouraged shoppers to stop buying table grapes and pressured stores to stop selling them. Many supermarket chains did stop selling grapes. He received much praise for his work in the Midwest.
In 1971, Medina met Dorothy Johnson, a UFW volunteer. They married in 1976.
Big Wins for the UFW
Medina also helped the UFW win a big victory in Florida. In 1971, The Coca-Cola Company signed a contract with the union for its Florida farms. Soon after, H.P. Hood and Sons did the same for its Florida Citrus operations.
In 1972, some farm owners and anti-union groups tried to pass a law in Florida. This law would have banned union hiring halls. Hiring halls were very important for the UFW to control who worked in the fields. Banning them would have made it very hard for the union to operate in Florida.
Eliseo Medina had already helped the UFW organize sugar cane workers in Florida. He showed the public the very difficult and unfair working conditions they faced. He also highlighted a serious illness outbreak in the fields.
Chávez had told Medina to return to California. Contracts with grape growers in the Coachella Valley were ending. But growers were signing unfair agreements with the Teamsters instead of the UFW. A strike began against the Coachella Valley growers. Medina successfully led the farmworkers against the Teamsters and helped settle the strike.
Medina then returned to Florida to try and stop the hiring hall bill. Even though he had little experience talking to lawmakers, he aimed to stop the bill completely. Medina started a huge letter-writing campaign. He also had an orange worker, who had been forced to work in very tough conditions, speak to the state legislature. The bill was defeated.
Changes in the UFW
César Chávez wanted to restart the grape boycott. So, he told Medina to close the UFW's Florida offices and move to Cleveland, Ohio. There, Medina would start boycott operations.
Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO (a national labor group) gave the UFW official recognition. This meant the UFW had to create a constitution and hold elections for its leaders. Eliseo Medina was elected to the UFW Board of Directors on September 23, 1973.
In 1978, Medina became the UFW's organizing director. In his first three months, the union won 13 elections and gained over 3,000 new members. He also changed how the UFW handled strikes. Before, the union would stop striking once they won an election. But employers would often appeal the election results, and union support would disappear over time.
Medina's new plan was to keep workers on strike even after winning the election. This pressured employers to accept the union and start talks right away. If talks stopped, Medina's backup plan was for union members to work slowly and then leave. This would cause the employer to lock them out, starting a strike. The employer would then return to talks to get the harvest in.
Many people thought Eliseo Medina might take over from César Chávez. In 1977, Medina was elected Second Vice President of the UFW. UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta said, "He would have been president if he'd stayed."
However, Medina did not stay. For several years, he had disagreed with Chávez about how much say workers had in the union. Medina also felt Chávez was trying to turn the union into a social movement for poor people, which Medina disagreed with. He later said, "We were so close, and then it began to fall apart... Cesar was more interested in leading a social movement than a union." Medina was also frustrated that Chávez wanted all UFW staff to be unpaid volunteers. Medina believed this made it hard to build a strong, lasting union.
Medina resigned from the union in August 1978. One final reason was Chávez's decision to close down the union's legal team. Many other top UFW leaders also left the union around this time.
Working with SEIU
After leaving the UFW, Eliseo Medina worked for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees for two years. He helped organize workers at the University of California. He also organized public employees in Texas.
In 1986, Eliseo Medina became the leader of SEIU Local 2028 in San Diego, California. He helped this local union grow a lot. Its membership went from 1,700 to 10,000.
Medina separated from his first wife in 1993. In 1995, he married Liza Hirsch Du Brul, who was also a former UFW organizer.
In 1996, Medina was elected international vice president on the SEIU executive board. He was the first Mexican American to be elected to such a high position at SEIU. Medina was a very active vice president. He led many successful union organizing efforts in the right-to-work states of the Southwest and Deep South.
He strongly supported the Active Citizenship Campaign. This effort in the mid-1990s aimed to increase Latino voting in Los Angeles County. This helped lead to the election of Antonio Villaraigosa as Mayor of Los Angeles in 2005.
Medina played a key role in SEIU's successful strike and organizing campaign at the University of Miami in 2001. He even went on a hunger strike to support the janitors there. In 2005, he brought the Latino voter project Mi Familia Vota to Arizona. There, he helped lead a successful effort to raise the state's minimum wage.
He also led SEIU's successful campaign to convince the AFL-CIO to change its long-standing view on immigration. The AFL-CIO had been against undocumented immigration. But thanks to Medina, they started supporting legalizing undocumented workers. Since the late 1990s, his ideas on immigration have been largely adopted by the American labor movement.
Medina was a driving force behind SEIU's Justice for Janitors campaigns in the 1990s and 2000s. He pushed the union to organize home healthcare workers. In 2000, he oversaw a Justice for Janitors effort that led to the biggest wage increases in the program's history. In 2001, he helped make an agreement between SEIU and the large Catholic Healthcare West hospital chain. This agreement led to thousands of new healthcare workers joining the union.
In 2010, he was unanimously elected international secretary-treasurer of the SEIU. He was re-elected to this position in 2012. As of 2010, Medina was an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Retirement and Immigration Reform
On September 3, 2013, Medina announced he would retire as an executive vice president of SEIU. He said he wanted to spend more time working to pass immigration reform. In November and December 2013, Medina, at age 67, went on a 22-day hunger strike. He did this to bring attention to the need for action on immigration reform. During his fast, President Obama visited Medina in a tent near the Capitol in Washington DC.
